Ahead of this week’s EU Council meetings of the Working Party on Intellectual Property (Copyright), the Austrian government has helpfully shared the Estonian Presidency’s revised compromise proposal on Articles 3 and 6 (including relevant recitals).

We’ve been following TDM with interest since the European Commission published its proposal on copyright in the Digital Single Market. Even though the Commission’s exception for TDM would be mandatory, we criticised their plan as not going far enough, as it would limit the beneficiaries of the exception only to research organisations, and only for purposes of scientific research.

The Estonian revisions leaves intact the Commission’s obligatory TDM exception that would apply to research organisations for purposes of scientific research. And, as expected, it continues to recommend that the beneficiaries originally contemplated by the Commission be expanded to include cultural heritage institutions. But the most significant change offered in this updated compromise proposal is an additional and optional exception in Article 3:

(5) Member States may provide for an exception or a limitation […] for temporary reproductions and extractions of works and other subject-matter that form an integral part of the process of text and data mining, provided that the works and other subject-matter are accessed lawfully and that the use of the works or other subject-matter for text and data mining is not expressly reserved by the rightholder.

This additional exception would apply to beneficiaries other than research organisations, and for uses other than scientific research. But those acts would be limited in that they only would cover temporary reproductions and extractions, and only if the rightsholder does not prohibit it. Continue reading →

Last month the British government published an independent report on Growing the artificial intelligence industry in the UK. The review, conducted by Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Jérôme Pesenti, discusses the potential for how artificial intelligence (AI) “can bring major social and economic benefits to the UK,” highlighting that AI could contribute an additional £630bn to the UK economy by 2035.

The report makes several recommendations that could be explored to support the continued development and adoption of AI in the UK, including improving access to data, training experts, and increasing demand for AI applications. Of particular interest to us are two specific recommendations:

“To improve the availability of data for developing AI systems, Government should ensure that public funding for research explicitly ensures publication of underlying data in machine-readable formats with clear rights information, and open wherever possible.

[and]

“To support text and data mining as a standard and essential tool for research, the UK should move towards establishing by default that for published research the right to read is also the right to mine data, where that does not result in products that substitute for the original works. Government should include potential uses of data for AI when assessing how to support for text and data mining.

It is clearly beneficial that governments require that the outputs of publicly funded research and data be made widely available in open technical formats that are consumable by computers. If the data is not made available in machine-readable formats, it will be impossible to efficiently conduct text and data mining across a large corpus of works. It’s also good that the report recommends that the UK push for an environment where “the right to read is the right to mine”—meaning that legal access to the underlying text or data should be sufficient for the user to conduct any further research techniques (such as TDM) and that no additional legal permissions or licenses should be required in order to do so. Continue reading →

It has been well over a year since the European Commission has presented its proposal for adapting the EU copyright rules to the realities of the digital age. The proposed changes (as flawed as they may be) are part of an agenda to make Europe more competitive and to stimulate economic growth.

The proposal continues to be debated in the European parliament with no real end in sight. In this situation we have taken today’s meeting of the EU Competitiveness Council (which brings together the ministers responsible for trade, economy, industry, research and innovation, and space from the 28 EU member states, as an occasion to write yet another open letter.

We write to you to share our respectful but serious concerns that discussions in the Council and European Commission on the Copyright Directive are on the verge of causing irreparable damage to our fundamental rights and freedoms, our economy and competitiveness, our education and research, our innovation and competition, our creativity and our culture. We refer you to the numerous letters and analyses sent previously from a broad spectrum of European stakeholders and experts for more details (see attached).

Attached to the letter are 29 different opinions, studies, open letters and reports that have been addressed at the EU legislators since the publication of the reform proposal. These include a recommendation co-signed by over 50 respected academics on measures to safeguard fundamental rights and the open Internet in the framework of the EU copyright reform, which points out that:

Article 13 (…) is disproportionate and irreconcilable with the fundamental rights guarantees in the Charter [of Fundamental Rights of the EU]

Article 13 appears to provoke such legal uncertainty that online services will have no other option than to monitor, filter and block EU citizens’ communications if they are to have any chance of staying in business. Article 13 contradicts existing rules and the case law of the Court of Justice.

Yesterday, the members of the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE) did the right thing and voted down the Commission’s proposal to impose upload filters on online platforms. The LIBE opinion, which was drafted by Polish EPP MEP Michał Boni and adopted with a clear majority of 36 votes for and just 5 against, dismantles the most problematic aspects of Article 13 of the Commission’s proposal: the members of the LIBE committee voted to remove the obligation for online platforms to use automated content recognition technologies to filter all user uploads in order to prevent users of these platforms from sharing copyrighted materials without permission from rights holders. The opinion also proposes strengthening user’s ability to contest the takedown of works they’ve uploaded.

Members of Parliament are recognizing the dangers upload filters pose to freedom of expresion..

…while Member States continue to push for mandatory censorship filters

Outside of the European Parliament the LIBE vote also sends a strong signal to the Member States who are discussing this issue in parallel. The Estonian presidency has proposed a new compromise text on article 13 that will be discussed among the member states later this week. The language proposed by the Estonian proposal significantly overhauls the Commission’s proposal, but that new coat of paint cannot hide the fact that it still tries to force online platforms to implement automated content filtering technologies. Continue reading →

There are many controversial things about current european copyright reform. We mainly hear about the fear of censorship of user-generated content or attempt to introduce something called ‘link tax’ to ensure press publishers right to control over the digital use of their content. But education? There are not many people, who will disagree that what Europe needs right now is a modern education system enhancing creativity, innovation and economic growth. Not to mention the importance of lifelong learning and the need of improving the quality and efficiency of education. Still repeated demand for digital skills and competences sounds like a cliche. You can find all of it well written down in EU documents and programs concerning education and training. So, there is one important question – why, when dealing with copyright issues, all these great ideas about the importance of education get forgotten?

After a few postponements, the vote at the LIBE Committee on their opinion on content filtering article is finally happening today. Given the variety of amendments tabled by its members, it is understandable that the MEPs took their time in negotiating common ground. Unfortunately the deletion of article 13 was not an option for the Civil Liberties Committee. So what would be the next best outcome of the vote?

The peculiar fate of LIBE’s draft opinion

LIBE was the last Committee to be granted a right to release an opinion on the current copyright dossier. Following the Committee mandate, it will only opine on article 13 and corresponding recitals as the ones having implications on fundamental rights and privacy of users. In his decent draft opinion, rapporteur Michal Boni stepped away from the content filtering obligations and tried to clean up the mess the European Commission had left MEPs to deal with regarding intermediary liability.

That probably didn’t help him make more friends within the European People’s Party, his own group that in part supports the filtering obligation. However, in a surprising twist of events, Boni’s draft was adopted as part of the final opinion of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, instead of the compromise language proposed by rapporteur Catherine Stihler and some truly horrific alternative ideas on how to make filtering great again authored by someCommitteemembers.

A compromise by popular demand

This move gave some prominence to the draft, probably a bit more than it needed from the perspective of the LIBE Committee workflow. We can only suspect that the backers of content filtering as the go-to solution to enforcing copyright did not like the fact that a proposal deprived of it gained traction in the Committee where the rapporteur has a seat during JURI Shadows’ meetings. It is quite possible that the rescheduling of the vote had to do with the fact that the draft opinion has as many fans as it has enemies. Continue reading →

Communia is a permanent observer of the Committee, and the following questions were made by me on its behalf:

Good morning, ladies and gentleman.

I’m speaking on behalf of COMMUNIA International Association on the Digital Public Domain.

We would like to thank the Secretariat for arranging for the update and expansion of the study on educational exceptions, and Professor Seng for conducting such study.

We have a few questions for Professor Seng regarding flexibilities, limitations and exceptions to TPM protection in the context of education.

According to your study, about 60% of WIPO Member States do not provide for flexibilities, limitations and exceptions to the protection of technological protection measures. Those findings are very concerning because, according to an impact assessment study conducted by the European Commission in 2016, technological restrictions are the most frequently encountered copyright-related obstacle by users of digital works in education: 31,2% of educators and 36,9% of learners stated that they “are not able to access, download, use or modify a digital work because of technological protection”.

When anti-circumvention laws were drafted at the international level, they were expected to protect TPMs insofar as they restricted acts not authorized by rightsholders. My first question to is if you think that this international legal framework permits users from circumventing technological measures when their aim is to exert their legal rights under the copyright exceptions, and if you believe that it would be appropriate for national laws to allow users to circumvent technological measures in order to exert their rights under educational exceptions?

My second question concerns Member States that do not allow circumvention. In the impact assessment study that I mentioned, mechanisms available to end-users to enforce their rights to use TPM-protected works, without circumventing the TPMs, were only identified in 8 EU countries, which means that 20 EU countries are doing nothing to ensure that their teachers and students can enjoy their rights under national copyright exceptions. Furthermore, even where such mechanisms exist, they can be very burdensome. In Germany, Spain and Sweden it is necessary to go to court to get access to the TPM-protected work. In France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, it is necessary to file a complaint with the relevant authorities or open a mediation procedure.

So, my second question to you is: what are the mechanisms available to teachers and students to enforce their rights to use TPM-protected works in those Member States that do not permit the circumvention of the TPMs?

Finally, I would like to know which country do you think has the most adequate provisions to ensure that beneficiaries of exceptions and limitations for educational purposes can legitimately access and use TPM-protected works?

In our capacity of permanent observers of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, we are attending the 35th session of the Committee, which is taking place in Geneva from 13 to 17 November 2017.

The following is the statement made by Teresa Nobre on our behalf on agenda item 7: Limitations and exceptions for educational and research institutions and for persons with other disabilities.

Do you remember the idea of educational fair use? The idea that education can benefit from a broad, flexible exception for a wide range of uses of copyrighted content while teaching and learning? The question is worth asking, as this progressive approach to copyright and education has not been mentioned even once in the ongoing European copyright reform process. It is a sign of how far away we are from right copyright for education. Instead, we are being pulled ever deeper into an opposite model, in which licensing is seen as the best copyright solution for educators and educational institutions. The Council of the European Union has just made one more step in that direction.

A quick reminder where we are with the copyright reform process in Brussels: the key vote in the JURI committee is continuously extended, and currently is planned for January 2018. The date should be seen as tentative. In the meantime, one more committee – the civil liberties committee LIBE – will make it’s vote in late November (but with a sole focus on the controversial article 13, the content filter article). As we await decisions to be made in the European Parliament, a proposal from the Council, prepared by the Estonian Presidency, has recently surfaced. Unfortunately, it spells one more step towards the licensing chasm for the educational sector.Continue reading →

This post is based on the talk Anna gave during CopyCamp 2017 “Paradigm Lost? How Our Freedoms are Weaponized Against Us and What We Can Do About It”. A video of the talk is available here.

How do you lobby for a great copyright in the post-political world? With difficulty, since it is also a post-factual world: politicians seem to care more about marketing than evidence. Perhaps when the facts are not important we should then look for a better propaganda?

Copyright beyond the bubble

This “better propaganda” should not be populist or based on lies. Digital rights organizations need a better, compelling narrative to convince people to care more. We need to test new approaches because European citizens do not realize that they are bound by the copyright framework every time they access news, knowledge or entertainment on the internet.

We also need to find more compelling ways to talk about rights in the digital environment because these days everybody is a creator and the only difference is that some of us identify as such and many of us don’t. Those of us who don’t, also don’t think that our small acts of creativity such as memes or photos we post online are serious enough to give us this status, but this does not change the fact that we are indeed creators.

From creativity to celebrity

In both cases creativity is crucial for self-expression, and self-expression is key to one’s identity. Today all three: creativity, self-expression and identity become market commodities, increasingly so via social media. So what happens when they enter the market?

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COMMUNIA advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge. We seek to limit the scope of exclusive copyright to sensible proportions that do not place unnecessary restrictions on access and use.

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Copyright reform for education has the objective to amplify the voice of education in the ongoing Copyright Reform debate in the European Union. We want to build awareness of the issue among stakeholders in the educational sectors. We will conduct research on educational licensing schemes in the European Union and will provide stakeholders reliable evidence that can be used in discussions concerning the European Commission’s plans to make legislative proposals on the EU exception for “illustration for teaching”. Read More about “Copyright Reform for Education”…

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